It Is On The Perfection Of God
That Malebranche Bases His Argument That 'Dieu N'agit Pas Par
Des Volontes Particulieres.' Yet Every Prayer Affects To
Interfere With The Divine Purposes.
It may here be urged that the divine purposes are beyond our
comprehension.
God's purposes may, in spite of the
inconceivability, admit the efficacy of prayer as a link in
the chain of causation; or, as Dr. Mozely holds, it may be
that 'a miracle is not an anomaly or irregularity, but part
of the system of the universe.' We will not entangle
ourselves in the abstruse metaphysical problem which such
hypotheses involve, but turn for our answer to what we do
know - to the history of this world, to the daily life of
man. If the sun rises on the evil as well as on the good, if
the wicked 'become old, yea, are mighty in power,' still, the
lightning, the plague, the falling chimney-pot, smite the
good as well as the evil. Even the dumb animal is not
spared. 'If,' says Huxley, 'our ears were sharp enough to
hear all the cries of pain that are uttered in the earth by
man and beasts we should be deafened by one continuous
scream.' 'If there are any marks at all of special design in
creation,' writes John Stuart Mill, 'one of the things most
evidently designed is that a large proportion of all animals
should pass their existence in tormenting and devouring other
animals. They have been lavishly fitted out with the
instruments for that purpose.' Is it credible, then, that
the Almighty Being who, as we assume, hears this continuous
scream - animal-prayer, as we may call it - and not only pays
no heed to it, but lavishly fits out animals with instruments
for tormenting and devouring one another, that such a Being
should suspend the laws of gravitation and physiology, should
perform a miracle equal to that of arresting the sun - for
all miracles are equipollent - simply to prolong the brief
and useless existence of such a thing as man, of one man out
of the myriads who shriek, and - shriek in vain?
To pray is to expect a miracle. Then comes the further
question: Is this not to expect what never yet has happened?
The only proof of any miracle is the interpretation the
witness or witnesses put upon what they have seen.
(Traditional miracles - miracles that others have been told,
that others have seen - we need not trouble our heads about.)
What that proof has been worth hitherto has been commented
upon too often to need attention here. Nor does the weakness
of the evidence for miracles depend solely on the fact that
it rests, in the first instance, on the senses, which may be
deceived; or upon inference, which may be erroneous. It is
not merely that the infallibility of human testimony
discredits the miracles of the past. The impossibility that
human knowledge, that science, can ever exhaust the
possibilities of Nature, precludes the immediate reference to
the Supernatural for all time.
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